In late February of 2024, Jordanian cargo planes flew over northern Gaza, dropping large pallets of food attached to giant parachutes down to crowds of scrambling Palestinians.
The area had been without consistent aid for weeks. The Israeli military was focusing much of its operations there, cutting off available delivery routes for international organizations. Out of desperation, Palestinians had resorted to eating animal feed and weeds.
Since the war began five months earlier, senior U.S. officials had been in intense discussions with the Israelis to open land routes to get more truckloads of aid into northern Gaza.
Now they watched the Jordanian airdrops on TV.
"The mockery of this complete bull**** PR stunt was universal," remembered a former U.S. official with direct knowledge of what happened. "Everybody knew that it wasn't going to make any meaningful dent."
But only a few days later, the U.S. decided it would be carrying out its own airdrops into Gaza.
"What was striking was how quickly we pivoted from criticism to emulation — not because we thought it was the right way to get aid in, but because, faced with an inability to diplomatically move the Israelis at that point to increase trucks, we were going to throw everything at the wall, no matter how inefficient, no matter how expensive, and frankly, no matter how dangerous," said the official.
NPR spoke to more than two dozen former senior U.S. officials, some of whom requested anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive internal discussions within the Biden administration. These officials, from the White House, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), were all directly involved in shaping U.S. policy on Israel's war in Gaza.
What they told was a story of strong, sometimes bitter arguments within the administration on how far the U.S. was willing to go to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more aid into Gaza. U.S. officials were left frustrated by hours-long, heated exchanges with their Israeli counterparts. The effort to deal with the emerging humanitarian crisis, officials say, was complicated by a president who felt a deep responsibility to Israel and its security, and the question of whether or not to openly confront Israel or use punitive measures, like withholding military aid.
The interviews with the officials revealed tensions between two main camps within senior ranks of the administration on how to approach the issue of humanitarian access: those who believed the U.S. needed to use its leverage to push Israel to adhere to the Geneva Conventions on civilian protection and allowance of aid, and those who believed in giving Israel space to conduct its war with Hamas, all the while pressing behind the scene for more aid to the besieged civilians.
But nearly two years since the war began, the moment many in the global aid world feared has arrived: Famine has been confirmed in Gaza, according to the world's leading authority on food insecurity.
It marks the grim milestone of a humanitarian situation in Gaza that has only deteriorated since President Trump came into office. But as the situation has worsened, many of the former officials NPR spoke with shared a common refrain: Did we do enough to prevent this?
It's a question that David Satterfield, a special envoy for Middle East humanitarian efforts under President Joe Biden, said he and other senior officials got asked many times throughout his tenure.
"Our answer was no, we're not doing enough, we were never able to mobilize a sustained adequate response to all of the humanitarian challenges faced by 2 million civilians in Gaza, in full honesty and modesty. But we prevented famine and starvation," Satterfield said, referring to the current situation under the Trump administration. "And while that may be considered a low bar, that is not an insignificant achievement."
"By definition we didn't do enough. Nobody can say we did enough," said one former senior U.S. official. "You can say we made a difference. It could have been worse."
But others have said these kinds of statements are not the standard by which to measure success when a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding at the hands of one of America's closest allies.
"The Biden administration was totally feckless when it came to holding the Netanyahu government to the standard of American law and the standards that we claim to apply to every other country in the world when it comes to the duty to provide humanitarian assistance," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told NPR.
Van Hollen and a half dozen Democratic senators put consistent pressure on Biden and his administration since the early days of the war to prioritize humanitarian aid into Gaza.
"There were many occasions over the many months that I raised the issue," Van Hollen remembered, saying that Biden often told him that they should have a longer conversation about the matter later. "But that conversation never happened."
The early days of the war set the tone
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led militants broke through the border fence separating Gaza from southern Israel, overrunning communities, Israeli military outposts and a music festival packed with young people. They killed around 1,200 people, and took another 251 into Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli officials. It was the deadliest and most catastrophic attack in Israel's history.
Israel responded almost immediately with airstrikes in Gaza, while Biden made his unwavering support for Israel clear, saying: "Israel has the right to defend itself and its people. Full stop."
Two days later, then-Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a "complete siege" on Gaza, halting all food, electricity, fuel and water to the blockaded enclave.
Gaza, which is walled-in on all sides except where it meets the Mediterranean, is dependent on Israel to allow both commercial and humanitarian goods in through a limited number of land crossing points. Before the war, an average of around 500 trucks per working day kept nearly all aspects of life in Gaza functioning.
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Under the siege, along with Israel's deadly and destructive airstrikes, the humanitarian situation in Gaza declined rapidly. But several former U.S. officials say the tragedy of what Israel had just experienced — and justifications for the military response — overshadowed discussions about aid.
"Within the U.S. government, there was reluctance from the White House to elevate humanitarian issues in the very, very early days," said one former senior USAID official. "The posture was we're not going to manage Israel's war in Gaza."
Several officials who spoke to NPR described a kind of chaos in those early days, balancing between understanding Israel's intended military plan in Gaza while also trying to make it clear to Israeli officials that a full blockade of aid into the enclave was a nonstarter. One U.S. official who traveled with a delegation to Israel said the mood there was one of "trauma and retribution."
In those initial weeks, the U.S. sent several generals from the Department of Defense to talk with the Israelis about military plans for Gaza that seemed overly ambitious, with Netanyahu talking about completely destroying Hamas, according to one official familiar with the trip.
The sense was that the Israeli military had no idea how long it would take to achieve the goal of completely destroying Hamas, one official said, recalling that many times the Israelis would mount operations on the fly as they pressed into Gaza. The humanitarian assistance component of the war, the official said, was practically nonexistent and the military mission was always paramount.
A former U.S. official familiar with events said the U.S. generals also were told by the Israeli military: "We're not involved in humanitarian aid. That's someone else's problem." But over time, that official said, there were heated exchanges with the Israeli military over that stance. U.S. officials told them a humanitarian crisis would hamper military operations, and eventually Israeli forces would be needed to provide protection for the aid corridors.
"In hindsight, I think it's clear that the operations in Gaza were planned," said one former senior administration official familiar with the conversations early on, describing Israel's systematic and deliberate military incursion into Gaza from the north to south. "What you didn't have from the very early days was an equally well thought out and robust humanitarian plan to go along with it."
Andrew Miller, the senior-most official focused on Israel-Palestine at the State Department for much of the Biden administration, told NPR that demanding a humanitarian plan along with Israel's military plan "would have potentially had the greatest impact on the subsequent trajectory of the war."
"I think the biggest missed opportunity in terms of U.S. policy was the failure to agree with Israel on the contours of the war, and that involved not only military operations, but how they would provide for Palestinian civilians in the interim while the conflict was going on," said Miller.
But others describe the reality of the early weeks, where discussion was completely hampered by Israel's insistence on fully blockading aid into Gaza.
And there was the acknowledgment of the political reality within the Israeli government. The U.S. saw Netanyahu as boxed in by far-right ministers in his Cabinet, and much of the Israeli public.
"We were up against a brick wall," remembered Satterfield, the Biden administration's special envoy for Middle East humanitarian efforts at that time. "The prime minister in one remark I remember said, 'If I were to allow even four trucks in, there would be IDF tanks in Jerusalem pointed at my office. The Israeli people would react.' That, of course, was hyperbole, but I'm giving you a sense of how difficult the conversation — and the public sentiment in Israel — was. Not one drop of aid, no fuel, no water; we can't do this. That was the message."
Throughout the war, Israel has maintained that its limitation of aid into Gaza was aimed at preventing Hamas from stealing it — a justification that has been pushed hard by the Netanyahu government. Now, more than 22 months into the conflict, both the U.S. government — in a report by USAID that NPR has obtained — and Israeli officials, as reported by The New York Times, have said there is no evidence of any pattern of aid theft by Hamas.
But that assertion hung over every conversation surrounding aid — and continues to do so.
Shortly after the war began in October of 2023, it took a week of nearly nonstop negotiation to get Israel to open one water pipe into Gaza and almost another week to allow Rafah — Gaza's southern crossing with Egypt — to start operating again. By then, the humanitarian situation was deteriorating quickly.
"Some of the specific things that the Biden administration did to move the Israeli government on humanitarian assistance in Gaza, did move the needle modestly. But it wasn't enough," said Elisa Ewers, a former senior U.S. official involved early in the planning. "By the time any progress was made, the situation on the ground was so dire that you were always playing catch-up. You were always trying to get ahead of the problem, when, in fact, you were very far behind."
Bogged down in the details
With the Israeli siege on Gaza underway — and even after it was eased in late October 2023 — the U.S. was left fighting to get aid in water line by water line, truck by truck, crossing by crossing. Dozens of officials from the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and USAID were spending hours and hours working the phones and trying to push Israelis to allow in more aid.
"The moment we started negotiating trucks and pallets, our leverage was used up," said one former U.S. official familiar with the effort. "I think the fact that we were dealing in the numbers so quickly, it kind of took you out of the big picture discussion, which was, this humanitarian crisis must be averted."
"If you were trying to get aid in, you had to do it through subterfuge, bureaucratic tactics, as opposed to a defined policy," another former senior official said. "You were on your back foot the entire god**** time."
Almost nothing got done unless top officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew or Satterfield called Netanyahu or his adviser Ron Dermer, or Gallant. Even Biden himself had to make calls negotiating what number of aid trucks would be let in from the border crossings, according to sources. This was the kind of time-consuming, in-the-weeds work normally carried out by a government desk officer, not the most senior leaders in the White House and the State Department.
Officials who described these calls to NPR said they appeared to be part of an Israeli strategy to bog the U.S. down in the details.
NPR reached out to the Israeli prime minister's office and the Israeli agency that oversees aid to Gaza for comment multiple times, but did not receive a response.
The White House was able to make some headway in the early months, such as convincing Israel to open up the Israeli port of Ashdod to allow in flour shipments as well as the Kerem Shalom border crossing for humanitarian aid trucks. But progress required constant pressure by the Biden administration, and in the end, despite the many hours spent on the phones, they say they were never really able to get Israel to "flood the zone" with aid, which is what the U.N. and other international aid groups said was needed to alleviate the suffering of civilians.
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"The Israelis knew exactly how much food was coming in and out, and they were giving a little and then they would pull back," said Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, who has studied the aid that was getting into Gaza. "So there's always constant pressure, particularly for fuel, water, on the population. There's constant tension with food."
The issue wasn't only with the number of trucks getting into Gaza. By February of 2024, public order, particularly in the enclave's north, had completely dissolved. The few aid trucks that were allowed in were looted by local gangs and people who were desperate to feed their families.
Both international aid organizations who were operating in Gaza and former administration officials said creating a deconfliction channel with the Israeli military and a humanitarian corridor to allow for the safe passage of aid trucks would have helped solve that problem.
Israeli officials repeatedly blamed the United Nations and aid groups for failing to distribute the aid, even as officials in the Biden administration knew that wasn't the case.
"You cannot both withhold effective, efficient coordination and deconfliction and then blame the international community for not moving the aid," Ambassador Satterfield said. Israeli officials did not respond to NPR's request for comment, but continue to publicly blame international aid organizations for failing to distribute aid properly.
Biden was averse to pressuring Israel
Hanging over the administration's stance on Israel's war in Gaza was the president's own sentiment for the Jewish state.
Notwithstanding the domestic pressure the Biden White House felt from groups supporting Israel and those that wanted him to take a more proactive approach to the humanitarian crisis, Biden had a relationship with Israel forged over decades of political life.
"President Biden had a personal, not political, but personal commitment [to Israel], which was moral and intrinsic to his life in government," according to Satterfield, who said the president felt an obligation to "stand up and defend Israel."
"That does not mean he was not beyond critical or angry or deeply frustrated at the humanitarian situation. We all were," Satterfield said.
Ultimately, the president was "convinced of the fundamental rightness of a campaign to eliminate Hamas' ability to ever do anything like this again," according to Satterfield.
Several of the officials who spoke to NPR said it was Biden's soft spot for Israel, however, that kept him from being politically tough, even in the face of a humanitarian catastrophe that the administration was well aware of.
One former senior official described the administration's approach as "morally bankrupt" from the beginning.
"There was never a solid defense of the right of Palestinians in Gaza to have assistance and the responsibility of Israel as the primary belligerent to do everything necessary to ensure that," the official said, referring to the obligation under international law that Israel has as the occupying power when it comes to civilians in Gaza in the war.
The White House's refusal to criticize Israel's conduct of war publicly, even as the civilian death toll spiked and hunger spread, led to an internal outcry within the State Department, USAID and even the White House, with staff pressuring more senior officials to act.
"At the very least we wanted to see some kind of a real recognition that the U.S. couldn't give a green light to Israel to ignore Palestinian humanity," a former USAID official said.
NPR reached out to Biden about this story. A spokesperson for the former president pointed to actions the administration took to get aid into Gaza and to public remarks Biden made over the course of the war on the importance of the humanitarian effort and on the suffering of the Palestinian people.
It wasn't just the president who believed foremost in the rightness of Israel's war, and the ongoing threat from Iran and its proxies. Several of the senior officials who thought the U.S. needed to push Israel to uphold international law felt that their concerns went unheard by other senior leaders like Blinken, Sullivan and Brett McGurk, Biden's lead negotiator on the Mideast. Others dispute that characterization.
The tensions played out in daily debates within the highest circles of the administration, according to officials who were in those meetings.
Staff within USAID and the State Department were sending nightly updates of how much food had made it into Gaza that day to Blinken and Sullivan, who raised those concerns with the Israelis frequently, according to sources. Throughout the war, Blinken visited Israel almost a dozen times, while Sullivan hosted several meetings with Israeli Cabinet members, both stressing humanitarian aid consistently.
But as months went on without a significant change in Israeli policy on aid, officials who were pushing for more U.S. pressure on Israel felt there needed to be accountability.
"We were saying, if they're [the Israelis] not listening, we have to have some consequences for that. Should pausing military aid be on the table? We should be having those discussions, like we would with anyone else that was doing this," the former official said.
But that's where they hit a wall with the president and his close advisers, the officials said.
"Because they felt that the Israelis would just shut them out and really just stop talking to them, or whatever influence they did have would be gone," the former official said, noting that, as the war continued, the administration became increasingly focused on securing a ceasefire deal, which needed Israeli cooperation. "And our point was that our influence isn't having much of an impact. So, we have to do something."
Sources who worked closely with those leaders stressed that it wasn't for a lack of care or concern among the senior leadership about the civilian toll and the growing mass starvation. But the lack of a clear strategy to address those concerns coupled with a reluctance to appear critical of Israel when it was fighting Hamas led to a kind of policy paralysis within the administration.
"There was no clarity of intent or purpose on our part," the former senior official said. "There were fears, there were worries, there was exhaustion, there was a sense that things weren't going right. There was a defense of Israel. It was just a strategic hodgepodge."
But some within the administration deny this take, stressing the sheer amount of work and attention put into getting more aid to Palestinians in Gaza.
"I spent as much time and effort on the humanitarian crisis as any other aspect of the war. Every day," Sullivan told NPR in a statement. "It's true I was mindful of what Israel was dealing with but I was demanding and pushing and I believe we made a lot of difference. We prevented famine."
A spokesperson for Blinken said he worked "relentlessly" on humanitarian aid for Gaza.
"He pressed Israel — publicly and privately — to take steps to minimize civilian harm and to uphold its obligations under international humanitarian law. He also sought out, encouraged and listened to different views within the State Department. Any suggestion to the contrary misrepresents both his leadership and the administration's sustained efforts to address the humanitarian crisis," the spokesperson said in a statement to NPR.
NPR also reached out to Brett McGurk on this story. He did not provide a statement.
"Fundamental distractions": airdrops and the pier
By the spring of 2024, aid groups on the ground in Gaza were ringing the alarm bells about an impending catastrophe. A vast majority of Gaza's 2.1 million people had been displaced, mostly to the southern cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, according to the U.N. Many were sleeping in the streets, and disease was spreading. Hunger was rampant as food became increasingly scarce, and more than 20,000 Palestinians had been killed, according to Gaza health officials.
Meanwhile, the Israelis were operating on a directive to provide as little humanitarian aid as possible. For many Israeli officials, the goal of eradicating Hamas was paramount, and allowing aid into Gaza was seen as contrary to that goal.
"We provide minimal humanitarian aid," Netanyahu said at a press conference around that time. "If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid."
The traditional land routes into Gaza were either still completely closed by Israel, or letting in very few trucks at a time. Often, they were blocked by far-right Israeli groups protesting aid into Gaza.
By late February, large areas of northern Gaza — where more than 100,000 civilians were thought to still be living, according to the U.N. — had been without access to aid for weeks, which is when Jordan, in conjunction with the United Arab Emirates, decided to start humanitarian aid drops. The U.S. soon followed.
"The situation was so desperate at that moment that we participated with this, but we did so with eyes open, fully understanding this was symbolic only," said Satterfield.
Humanitarian experts consider airdrops inefficient and a last resort, something to be done only when land delivery of aid is not an option. They're also dangerous, especially in such a densely populated area like Gaza; by mid-March at least five Palestinians had been killed when the parachute on pallets failed to open, crushing the people below, and 12 had drowned trying to reach aid that had landed in the sea.
Then, Biden made an announcement at his State of the Union address: The U.S. military would be building a floating pier off the northern coast of Gaza, which he said would "enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day."
That pier, which took more than two months to build and cost around $230 million, ended up being a project mired with problems. It only functioned for about 20 days total and delivered aid that was a drop in the bucket compared to what was needed.
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Even in hindsight, many of the officials NPR talked to defended the pier and the airdrops, saying that there was a feeling within the administration that every bit of aid, no matter how costly or inefficient, was worth getting in.
"The president felt if we have a resource not being used that could help, even as temporary, costly and partial as it was, we were obliged. He was obliged to do it," said Satterfield.
But others in the administration felt that it was a clear and public example of just how ineffective U.S. pressure was on Israel to open the much more effective and important land routes into Gaza.
"We were in Hail Mary mode," said one former official. "These were all Band-Aids for gunshot wounds." Another said the U.S. was basically "throwing spaghetti" against a wall to see what would stick. Some on Capitol Hill even suggested U.S. C-130 cargo planes could land in Gaza and deliver aid, until they were told there were no airfields.
Aid groups working on the ground in Gaza were also frustrated by the Biden administration.
"The politics allowed them, or they allowed the politics, to distract from the essentials of basic good humanitarian action," said Ciarán Donnelly, senior vice president of the International Rescue Committee, referring to the various projects under the Biden administration as "fundamental distractions from the core of what was needed to provide aid to Gaza."
"I call them distractions because it was abundantly clear — and we made it abundantly clear in public and private, as did others — that these mechanisms could never be a substitute for what the established professional humanitarian actors on the ground could provide, and they could never be a substitute in terms of volume of aid," said Donnelly.
This is one point where the two camps in the Biden administration divide, even today. One argues that continued pressure on Israel, as well as workarounds like humanitarian airdrops and the pier, were the only effective — and politically viable — approach. The other argues that they ignored the strongest tool the U.S. had in its toolbox to pressure Israel: withholding military assistance, something that both U.S. law and a specific Biden administration directive made possible.
"There were really smart people working tirelessly every day to get in more aid, a truck or a convoy at a time," said Christopher Le Mon, a senior State Department official working in human rights under the Biden administration. "But when none of that was enough to ensure Palestinians weren't starving to death, the administration still refused to try the one tool that might have fundamentally reshuffled what was pretty clearly a stacked deck. That was a profound and tragic mistake."
Pressure from within to withhold weapons
Le Mon says he and several other senior colleagues across the State Department worked to encourage the administration to invoke a section of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, which states that no military aid should go to a country that is withholding U.S. humanitarian aid.
"I urged from the early weeks of the war that the president and the secretary [of state] should have made clear that no ally, no partner, no recipient of U.S. arms gets them with a blank check. This wasn't about singling out Israel, it was the opposite — about abiding by U.S. laws and policies that applied globally," he said. "Maybe it wouldn't have worked, but it would have made clear that we didn't endorse Israel's misconduct, and we owed it to the Palestinians and to our own credibility to try."
On Capitol Hill, a half dozen Democratic lawmakers were also pushing for the withholding of U.S. weapons under the same law, including Sen. Van Hollen.
Eventually, in early 2024, that pressure — especially from Van Hollen — led to a policy shift within the administration. Biden signed off on what was called National Security Memorandum 20, which created a requirement that the administration issue a report on the extent to which the Israeli government was complying with certain measures, including whether it had used U.S. weapons in violation of international humanitarian law and whether it had been providing humanitarian assistance in a manner consistent with U.S. law.
"It was designed to be the tool that held the Netanyahu government accountable," Van Hollen told NPR.
In April 2024, Blinken sent a letter to Gallant, Israel's defense minister at the time, reminding him that the report for NSM 20 was coming out soon and insisting more humanitarian aid get in. Biden also called Netanyahu, after an Israeli strike killed seven workers for the World Central Kitchen, emphasizing that strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation were "unacceptable."
In the days that followed, Biden made some of his harshest comments about Netanyahu, saying the way he was waging the war was a "mistake," and there was "no excuse" for not allowing more aid into Gaza.
And, in the ensuing weeks, aid into Gaza did increase. Several officials who had worked on NSM 20, including Van Hollen, thought that maybe it was working as a way to pressure Israel.
The report was presented to Congress in May of 2024, concluding that it was "reasonable to assess" that U.S. weapons had been used by Israel in Gaza in violation of international humanitarian law.
One senior State Department official who worked on the report called it "opaque," while another called it "watered-down." Another official familiar with the report acknowledged there were "difficult conversations," when the report was being put together, and some felt "strongly" about what should and should not be included.
Several Democratic lawmakers, including Van Hollen, put out statements condemning the report. "They made a very general finding," he told NPR, adding that he thought the report "whitewashed the conduct of the Netanyahu government."
But former White House officials stress how challenging and time-consuming it is to prove specific armed conflict violations, especially when independent investigators are unable to carry out assessments on the ground. Israel has not allowed international investigators into Gaza throughout the war, citing safety concerns.
Still, Van Hollen and others say a tougher report, and a willingness to enact an arms ban, would have made it clear that the U.S. had the leverage to hold Israel accountable.
Eventually, the U.S. held back a shipment to Israel of 2,000-pound bombs and 500-pound bombs in May 2024 because of concerns about an upcoming operation in the teeming southern Gaza city of Rafah, which had also become the epicenter for aid distribution.
"I made it clear that if they go into Rafah — they haven't gone in Rafah yet — if they go into Rafah, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities — that deal with that problem," Biden said at the time in an interview with CNN.
One official said it was too little, and the U.S. undercut its own tough message by saying it was not a halt of arms but a "pause."
But one senior Biden official said that despite the urgings of Van Hollen and fellow senators, there was never sufficient political will — either in the White House or Capitol Hill — to cut off arms to Israel. In fact, Congress, across party lines, voted several times throughout the war to significantly increase military aid to Israel.
And there was some concern a complete cutoff of arms to Israel, even if politically supportable, may have emboldened Hamas, making them believe it was a win and therefore less likely to negotiate.
Moreover, two former U.S. officials said that in hours-long meetings the Israelis said they would continue to press their military operation in Gaza even if the United States halted all arms shipment. "If we have to go it alone, we'll go it alone," one official recalled the Israelis as saying.
By the end of the Biden administration, one official said the U.S. served as the "conscience" for Netanyahu by urging more aid, while the humanitarian officials within the administration "were our conscience."
A "stain" on U.S. moral standing
There was a brief window of hope as the Biden administration was leaving office, with a ceasefire in place between Israel and Hamas, secured in part by U.S. officials from the Biden White House and the incoming Trump administration. It allowed for a significantly larger amount of aid, with trucks entering Gaza at above-prewar levels.
But shortly after Trump came into office, the situation deteriorated significantly. Israel imposed another total blockade on Gaza in early March, and then broke the ceasefire with Hamas a few weeks later. That blockade — which meant no food, medical supplies or fuel could enter Gaza via land — lasted for nearly three months.
Around the same time, Trump rescinded NSM 20, the Biden-era policy that linked U.S. arms transfers to the observance of international humanitarian law.
Life for Palestinians in the enclave has only gotten worse since, culminating in an extraordinary declaration of famine by the IPC, the world's leading authority on food insecurity, on Aug. 22.
Aid officials tell NPR that the U.S. is no longer exerting the same kind of consistent pressure on Israel as it did under the Biden administration to allow more aid in. And with the dismantling of USAID and terminations of many State Department staff working in humanitarian and human rights departments, there are fewer internal pressures on U.S. leaders. Almost none of the officials working on the issue under the Biden administration are still working on it today.
Instead, the Trump administration has invested $30 million into the Israeli-backed and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has done little to alleviate hunger and has instead made the quest for food on the ground in Gaza increasingly perilous by requiring Palestinians to walk for miles, often through active Israeli military zones.
More than 2,000 Palestinians have been killed since May while trying to get aid, according to Palestinian health officials. A vast majority of the small amount of aid trucks that are allowed into Gaza now are looted by hungry people or armed gangs before reaching their intended destination, according to the U.N.
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As global outrage grew over starvation in Gaza, Trump signaled in late July that the U.S. would partner with Israel to create new "food centers" in Gaza but offered little detail. "We're going to be dealing with Israel and we think they can do a good job of it," Trump told reporters on Air Force One.
In the month since, little has changed for Palestinians in Gaza. A White House official responded to NPR's request for comment stressing that Trump "wants to ensure the people of Gaza are fed," adding that former Biden officials who oversaw "the disastrous Gaza pier have no room to criticize President Trump's efforts to find creative humanitarian solutions."
But many of the Biden administration officials NPR spoke with have pointed out how much worse the humanitarian situation has gotten under the new administration, while also wondering if there's more they could have done.
"Probably like all of my colleagues, I still think about it every hour of every day. It is war. It is hellish. And it needs to end. And when we walked out the door, we had a ceasefire," said one former senior Biden administration official, nodding to the 60-day ceasefire that was in place in January.
One official said, in hindsight, maybe they should have mounted airdrops and the pier earlier.
Still another said there were certain policy decisions that Biden could have put in place to put even more pressure on Israel to open up more border crossings for aid, such as withholding some U.S.-made weapons from Israel or joining the U.N. Security Council when it voted for a ceasefire. Instead the U.S. abstained from that vote.
Ultimately, aid groups and humanitarian experts told NPR that even when the Biden administration tried to help, it undercut its own message by not drawing red lines for civilian protection.
"I think everyone has failed," said Spiegel of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University. "Both the Biden and Trump administrations have failed greatly in terms of protecting civilians and putting consistent pressure on Israel to actually make a change in Gaza. Biden and Blinken tried, but they didn't do enough."
Another former senior official said the tragedy of Gaza has fundamentally compromised American standing in the world and any claims to global leadership.
"We allowed our No. 1 ally, on our watch, to violate every single principle and pillar of humanitarian assistance and civilian protection that we created for the world," the official said.
"It's a stain which everyone in the world sees, even if we don't."
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